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Overview
OpenZipkin Brave is a distributed tracing implementation compatible with Twitter Zipkin backend services, written in Java. For quite a while OpenZipkin Brave offers a dedicated module to integrate with Apache CXF framework, namely brave-cxf3. However, lately the discussion had been initiated to make this integration a part of Apache CXF codebase so the CXF team is going to be responsible for maintaining it. As such, it is going to be available in upcoming 3.2.0 release under cxf-integration-tracing-brave module, with both client side and server side supported. This section gives a complete overview on how distributed tracing using OpenZipkin Brave could be integrated into JAX-RS / JAX-WS applications built on top of Apache CXF.
OpenZipkin Brave is inspired by the Twitter Zipkin and Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure paper and is a full-fledged distributed tracing framework. The section dedicated to Apache HTrace has pretty good introduction into distributed tracing basics. However, there are a few key differences between Apache HTrace and OpenZipkin Brave. In Brave every Span is associated with 128 or 64-bit long Trace ID, which logically groups the spans related to the same distributed unit of work. Within the process spans are collected by reporters (it could be a console, local file, data store, ...). OpenZipkin Brave provides span reporters for Twitter Zipkin and java.util.logging loggers.
Under the hood spans are attached to their threads (in general, thread which created the span should close it), the same technique employed by other distributed tracing implementations. However, what is unique is that OpenZipkin Brave distinguishes three different types of tracers:
- server tracer (com.github.kristofa.brave.ServerTracer)
- client tracer (com.github.kristofa.brave.ClientTracer)
- local tracer (com.github.kristofa.brave.LocalTracer)
Apache CXF integration uses client tracer to instantiate spans on client side (providers and interceptors) to demarcate send / receive cycle, server tracer on the server side (providers and interceptors) to demarcate receive / send cycle, while using local tracer for any spans instantiated within a process.